The president of the school board (who turned out to be Aaron's father—Jonny was pretty excited about that) and the other members of the board who were still in town and a couple of principals stood on the stage. Aaron's father did the talking.
"The unconfirmed numbers indicate that half the school-age children in the district won't be returning to school here," he said. "And a somewhat higher percentage of teachers, principals, and staff have indicated they won't be returning."
It's funny. I go into town at least twice a week, and while I've certainly noticed fewer people on the streets, I haven't given it much thought. All the stores are closed. One gas station is open on Tuesdays. But I've been assuming the reason I'm not seeing people is because there's nothing to do if they do come into town. I hadn't realized it was because people were moving out. Or too sick to get to town. Or dying.
"Our resources are limited," Aaron's father said. "The governor contacted all the heads of school boards in Pennsylvania last week and told us to expect no help from the state. Every district is on its own. We're certainly in no worse shape than other districts, but that's not saying very much."
It was quiet then. Even the little kids who were crying shushed.
"The board, what remains of the board, has been trying to figure out how to handle our circumstances," Aaron's father said. "These decisions haven't been made quickly or easily. We have children here, too."
I thought he was going to say that there wasn't going to be school, but he didn't. At least not exactly.
"We think the best use of our resources at least for the time being is to keep two schools open," he said. "The high school and Maple Hill Elementary. Parents should send their children to whichever school is closer to their home. We'll start school on August thirty-first."
"What about buses?" one parent called out.
"No bus service," Aaron's father said. "Not for the foreseeable future."
"I live six miles away from the high school," another parent said. "And Maple Hill's got to be ten miles away. I have two elementary school kids. How are they supposed to get to school?"
"You'll have to make your own arrangements," Aaron's father said. "Perhaps you could carpool with neighbors."
A lot of people laughed at that.
"What about food?" another parent yelled. "My kids are hungry. I've been counting on school lunches."
"We can't supply lunches," Aaron's father said. "Give your children a large, nourishing breakfast, and feed them again when they get home from school."
"You want to tell us where that large nourishing breakfast is going to come from?" a woman yelled.
Aaron's father ignored her and all the other people who were starting to make noise. "Naturally, the schools don't have electricity," he said. "We ask every parent to give their child a flashlight to take to school. We'll try to make the best use of natural light, but as we all know, lately that's been hard to come by. We're going to start with a nine AM to two PM school day, but we'll probably change that as the days get shorter."
"What about heat?" someone yelled.
I have to give Aaron's father credit. I'd have been running out of there by then, but he just took it.
"The schools are heated by natural gas," he said. "I spoke to a vice president of the company last week. He was unable to assure me that there'd be any natural gas going through the pipelines much past September."
"Wait a second," a man yelled. "Is that just for the schools or for everybody?"
"Everybody," Aaron's father said. "Believe me, I questioned him carefully about that. The man I spoke to said the best-case estimate right now is for the gas supplies to end by early October."
"Even for the hospital?" someone asked. "They have electricity. Will they have heat, too?"
"I can't speak for the hospital," Aaron's father said. "Perhaps they have some electrical heating system. The schools don't. We're dependent on natural gas, and we need to assume that we won't have any by October."
"So you want my kids to walk ten miles to starve and freeze at school!" a woman yelled. "Is that what you're telling us?"
Aaron's father just plowed on. "In case there's any uncertainty about this, there'll be no after-school activities," he said. "And many of the high school classes can no longer be offered. We're going to try to divide the teachers as evenly as possible between the two schools, and we think there'll be enough teachers, but no one should assume that a certain teacher or subject will be available. No more science labs or gym. We're fortunate that Mrs. Underhill, the school nurse, is still working with us. She'll divide her days between the two schools. She's requested that if a child complains of any discomfort, that child not be sent to school. We have no way of contacting parents if a child needs to be sent home. And naturally, we're concerned that an infected child could make classmates sick as well."
"How do we know Mrs. Underhill is going to stay on?" a man shouted. "Or any of the teachers? What if they decide to get the hell out of here?"
"That might happen," Aaron's father said. "None of us can be certain what next month is going to be like, or the month after that or after that. We're trying to do the best we can, and it's our opinion that even a little bit of school is better than none. If you think your children would be better off being homeschooled, simply go to one of the two schools and sign up for the grade-appropriate textbooks." He stood there for a long brave moment and then said, "Any other questions?"
It turned out there were, lots of them, but they mostly had to do with natural gas. I guess this was the first people had heard that the supply was going to run out.
It wasn't until I got home that I realized we use natural gas for the stove and the water heater.
I asked Mom about that and she said we'd cook our food and heat our water on the woodstove, so we'd be okay. She says she doesn't know what people who don't have woodstoves are going to do, but she guesses they'll move out, try down south or something. Although she heard on the radio this morning that North Carolina has already had a frost, so she isn't sure things are going to be much better anyplace else.
No one's crops are doing well because there's been no sunlight anywhere for over a month. Or rain, for that matter. So we're all going to freeze and starve no matter where we live.
She didn't exactly put it that way. Actually she said we'd be fine because we had heat and food and each other.
She also told Jonny and me to think about school. If we want to give it a try, that's fine by her. If we want to stay home, she and Matt would teach us and that would also be fine. We shouldn't worry if one of us wanted school and the other wanted to stay home. We should each decide what we wanted for ourselves, and she would go along with the decision.
I think I'm going to give school a try. It's going to be so weird, school without Megan and Sammi and Dan and most of the other kids I know. But if I'm not used to weird by now, I don't know when I will be.
August 27
Mom says we're about equidistant from Maple Hill and the high school, and she doesn't think anyone will care which school we pick. But if we do decide to go to school, she'd prefer it if Jonny and I went to the same one.
I talked to Jonny about it this afternoon. He said he wasn't that crazy about going to school, but if he did, he'd rather go to Maple Hill. I guess it's because it's familiar to him.
Of course I'd rather go to the high school. Maple Hill is a real baby school: K through 3. I don't even know if I'd fit in the desks.
Which is pretty funny because Jonny's taller than I am.
August 28
An all-bad day.
First of all, my watch stopped. I guess it needs a new battery, only it isn't like I can get a lift to the mall and have a new one put in. The clock in my bedroom is electric, so that hasn't run for weeks now.
It used to be I could look out the window and get some sense of what time it was. Oh, not if it was 2 am rather than 3 AM, but dawn looked different than midnight.
Only with the sky gray a
ll the time, dawn's harder to recognize. You can sort of see the sky is lighter, but there's nothing like a sunrise anymore. So now when I'm in bed, I have no idea what time it is. I don't know why that should be important to me, but it is.
When I finally did get out of bed this morning, Mom looked super grim. We had a choice of bad news.
First of all, there was a killing frost last night. Leaves are already starting to fall off the trees and now any plants that were outside have died. It feels like late October and we all know if it's like this in August, it's going to be hell this winter.
Mom had brought in what she could of the vegetables she planted last spring, but of course nothing had done very well. Tiny tomatoes. Tinier zucchini. We were glad for them, and, sautéed in olive oil, they were a real treat. But her dreams of canning pints and pints of vegetables vanished, and I know she's worried about our food supply in a couple of months' time.
We spent today digging out all the root vegetables, the potatoes and carrots and turnips she'd planted. They all looked smaller than normal, too, but at least they're something and we can eat them for a few days and save on the canned food.
Then when Mom was through telling us about killer frosts, she said the past two days when she'd turned on the radio, she hadn't gotten any signal.
We have three radios with batteries, and she tried all of them. We all tried all of them, because nobody wanted to believe her. But of course she was telling the truth. All any of us got was static.
I haven't been listening to the news for months now. I haven't wanted to know any more than I have to. But I know Mom listens every morning for a few minutes and she tells us what we need to know.
Now we won't know what we need to know.
I guess the radio stations ran out of electricity. Matt says even if the most powerful stations had their own generators, those generators have limited capacity.
But without hearing what's going on in the real world, it's easy to think there is no real world anymore, that Howell, PA, is the only place left on earth.
What if there is no more New York or Washington or LA? I can't even imagine a London or Paris or Moscow anymore.
How will we know? I don't even know what time it is anymore.
August 29
Something scary happened today, and I don't know if I should tell Mom or Matt.
I volunteered to do the bike run into town today. I wanted to get the feel of biking to the high school, in case Jonny and I end up there. Maple Hill we'd do back routes, but it makes more sense to bike through town to get to the high school.
Also I had some library books to return. I don't know what we'll do when the library closes. It's open two days a week, Monday and Friday, same as the post office.
I bundled up (temperature was 42 degrees, and the way the air tastes and how dark it is all the time makes you feel even colder), loaded the bike, and started toward town. I was pedaling downhill on Main Street when I felt like something was different. It took me a moment to figure out what it was and then I realized I could hear people laughing.
Nowadays, because nobody is driving anymore, sound really carries. Only there isn't much sound to hear. There's always a crowd at the post office and sometimes there are people at the library but that's pretty much it for town. I guess the hospital is busy and noisy, but I haven't been there in a while. So even though you could hear noise, there usually isn't any noise to hear.
I didn't like the way the laughter sounded. It was scary hearing it, and I slowed my bike down and kind of hid in a place where I could look down the couple of blocks and see what was going on.
There were five guys on Main Street. I recognized two of them: Evan Smothers, who's a year ahead of me in school, and Ryan Miller—he was on Matt's hockey team. The other guys looked to be about the same age, maybe a little older.
Ryan and one other guy were holding guns. Not that there was anyone there for them to shoot. The street was empty except for the five of them.
Two of the guys were removing the plywood off storefronts. Then one of them would break the pane glass and go into the store.
All the stores in town are empty. There isn't much to take out of any of them, so I don't know why they even bothered. It was the plywood they seemed most interested in. They'd remove sheets of it, and put it into a pickup truck.
I stood there watching for 5 minutes or so (now that I don't have a watch, time is a guess on my part). No one tried to stop them. No one even showed up on the street. For all I know, I was the only person who saw what they were doing.
Then I remembered if I backed up a block or two I could take the back route to the police station.
I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life. The gang didn't seem to realize I was there, but if they did, they could have shot me. Maybe they wouldn't have. Maybe they just would have laughed at me. There was no way of knowing.
But it made me so mad to see them destroying the stores and stealing the plywood and having a truck that must have had gas. I thought about Sammi and the guy she went off with and how gangs like this must be all over the place, taking things from people who need them and selling the things to people who could pay. However they pay.
So I got more angry than scared and backed up the hill very quietly and biked around to the police station. I had no way of knowing if the cops could get to Main Street in time, but at least I could identify two of the guys.
Only when I got to the police station, it was closed. The doors were locked.
I banged hard against them. I didn't want to yell because I was only a couple of blocks away from where the gang had been taking down the plywood and I was scared they'd realize I was there. I peeked into the window. Of course things were dark, but I couldn't see anybody.
It isn't like Howell has a big police department. We never needed one. But I figured someone was there all the time.
I guess I was wrong.
I tried to figure out where else I could go. My first thought was the firehouse. But then I remembered that the last time Peter came over he said that people were setting fires in their houses to keep warm and then the houses caught fire, and the firehouse had been closed and they were seeing a lot of burn cases in the hospital. We should be careful with fire.
It was a very Peter speech. At least he's stopped saying we should be careful with mosquitoes because they vanished when the frosts started.
Thinking about Peter made me think about the hospital. At least there'd be people there. I biked around an extra half mile or so to avoid going straight through town and went to the hospital.
Things really were different there from the last time. There were two armed guards standing in front of the main entrance and another two by the emergency door. There must have been 20 people standing by the emergency door.
I went to the main door.
"No visitors allowed," one of the guards said. "If you have a medical emergency go to the emergency door and wait for a nurse to admit you."
"I need to talk to a police officer," I said. "I went to the police station and there was nobody there."
"We can't help you," the guard said. "We're privately hired. We have nothing to do with the police department."
"Why are you here?" I asked. "Where are the police?"
"We're here to make sure no one enters the hospital who isn't in need of medical care," the guard said. "We keep out people who want to steal food and supplies and drugs. I can't tell you where the police are."
"They've probably moved out," the second guard said. "I know a couple of them took their families and started south about a month ago. Why do you need the police? Has anyone attacked you?"
I shook my head.
"Well, it's not wise for a girl your age to be out by herself," the guard said. "I won't let my daughters or my wife go outside anymore unless I'm with them."
The other guard nodded. "Times like these, you can't be too careful," he said. "No place is safe for a woman anymore."
"Thank
you," I said, although I have no idea what I was thanking them for. "I guess I'll go home now."
"Do that," the guard said. "And stay home. Tell your parents they need to be more careful with their children. One day a girl like you might go out for a bike ride and never come home."
I shivered the entire ride home. Every shadow, every unexpected noise, made me jump.
I won't go to the high school. The only way of getting there is through town. But the only way of getting to Maple Hill is by back routes. And anyone could be there as well. It isn't like I can count on Jonny to protect me.
When I got in, Mom didn't notice that the library books were the same ones I'd taken with me. She asked if there were any letters from Dad, and I lied and said there weren't.
It probably isn't a lie, but I felt bad saying it just the same.
I don't know what to do.
August 30
At supper tonight, Mom asked Jonny and me what we'd decided to do.
"I don't think I'll go to school," Jonny said. "It isn't like anybody else is going to."
"You do realize you'll have to study here," Mom said. "You can't just sit around and do nothing."
"I know," Jonny said. "I'll work hard."
"What about you, Miranda?" Mom asked.
I immediately burst out sobbing.
"Oh, Miranda," Mom said in her Not Again voice.
I ran out of the kitchen and flew upstairs to my room. Even I knew I was acting like a 12-year-old.
After a few minutes, Matt knocked on my door and I told him to come in.
"You okay?" he asked.
I blew my nose and nodded.
"Anything bothering you in particular?" he asked and the question was so ridiculous I began to laugh hysterically.
I thought Matt was going to slap me, but then he started laughing right along with me. It took both of us a few minutes to calm down, but finally we did, and I told him about what had happened in town. Everything. I told him who the guys were and how the police station was closed and what the guards had said at the hospital.